Bilingual communication has become an increasingly difficult problem in a number of areas, such as, for example, health care, police and fire departments, and other governmental agencies.
There is a growing awareness of a need to remotely bring interpreting services into situations where clear understanding is critical during communication between at least two people communicating in different languages. Common venues involve healthcare, police and fire, courts, global business and military encounters.
In the United States, the situation has become particularly needful in an increasing number of areas of public service. Laws and resulting legal liabilities combine with a growing immigration of people not fluent in English to create situations where public services are mandated to provide what they often are unable to do. As an example, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires healthcare facilities to make “reasonable accommodation” for the disabled. However, many healthcare facilities have little or no onsite personnel able to assist hearing impaired in location-specific sites such as emergency rooms in a timely manner. In addition, other location-specific sites involving police and fire-fighters, in a similar manner, are often unable to provide clear communication between hearing-impaired people needing services and those able to offer services.
This situation also occurs with people that are able to hear well but are not fluent in English. Currently in the United States, there are regions with large numbers of people who are not fluent in English but are fluent in other languages such as, for example, Spanish, Laotian, and Somali, to name a few.
In addition, privacy laws have placed an additional burden on clear communication through electronic means. In the United States, there are standards provided by government agencies defining minimal levels of security required to be privacy compliant. It is thus a matter of time before medical or other emergency, location-specific electronic communications will be legally required to comply with privacy mandates.
Present means to address the communication problem are inadequate. Conference call arrangements do not address the location-specific nature and short time intervals often necessary for clear communication to occur. Software programs and other artificial intelligence means have not evolved sufficiently to provide the necessary clear communication as needed at location-specific sites. Early teachings of the broad use of mobile devices with internet connections have not been enabling. Use of dedicated phone lines to call centers, and dedicated lines linking interpreters to sites requiring interpretation have not been sufficiently location independent or timely to address the need stated earlier. The presence of live interpreters provides clear communication but their availability is limited in location-specific sites, particularly where short time intervals exist to provide such clear communication. With life-and-death decisions often needing to be made in minutes rather than hours, time is often inadequate to obtain the presence of live interpreters as location-specific sites when appropriate.
Thus there is still a need for a system that provides clear communication in a time-sensitive manner at location-specific sites between people able to communicate fluently only in different languages.